With over 150,000 individual data points, the survey enabled the detailed analysis of which sourcing channels are delivering the best results for recruiters within specific industries and company sizes. Sourcing channels analysed in the report include generalist and specialist job boards, employee referrals, talent pools, social media, professional social networks and, new for 2018, job aggregators and events and careers fairs.

Key aims of the survey:

To discover the biggest challenges in candidate sourcing and how this compares to previous years.

Identify which sourcing channels provide the best quantity and quality candidates.

Compare differences between in-house and agency strategies and tactics.

Assess the impact of recruitment marketing tactics on candidate attraction.

Key findings from the 2018 survey include:

Top sources for candidate sourcing - For in-house recruiters, Employee Referrals retain the top-spot for providing the highest quality of candidates but cannot be relied on to deliver sufficient numbers.

Social Media (not including Professional Social Networks) is reported to be an under-performing channel for the majority of recruitment teams. New this year was the addition of sourcing channels Events & Careers Fairs and Job Aggregators (sponsored and not sponsored); the latter reported to provide a high quantity of candidates but often at the expense of candidate suitability for the advertised vacancies.

For many industries, scarcity of qualified candidates remains the most significant recruitment challenge. Other problems affecting substantial numbers of recruitment functions include: ‘lack of brand awareness’ and ‘lack of recruitment budget’.

Top performing corporate careers sites are four times more likely to contain candidate-centric content that can assist the candidate throughout the entire recruitment process. The report identifies the specific types of online content that candidates will find on ‘peak-performing’ sites.

Regularly monitoring and measuring sourcing channels is key to improving your return on advertising investment – unfortunately, a third of recruiters either can’t or don’t measure their sources.

Bruce Groves, Marketing Director at Eploy, commented on the report launch, “We were delighted to get our biggest ever response to the annual UK Candidate Attraction Survey with almost 900 UK recruiters taking part. We hope in-house recruitment teams across all industries and company sizes will find the full report a useful resource to benchmark their own experiences with their sector peers – and for agencies to see what’s working well for in-house recruiters.

We’d like to thank all of the recruiters who took part in the survey and look forward to seeing how candidate sourcing channels, strategies and tactics develop over the next twelve months.”